Help! 194 files missing from NTFS drive; can I rebuild MFT?

[Guest]

Yesterday, I downloaded 194 jpg photos from my digital camera to a large,
external NTFS drive.

There were definitely there: they were all listed in Windows Explorer; I
even looked at a dozen or so of them. But now they're simply missing: when
I click on that directory, Explorer looks around for a while, then shows an
empty directory. Other directories within the same parent directory still
show all their photo files.

In between, I ran a couple of programs: PhotoShop, trying to make
thumbnails of those 194 files (this crashed out); and a picture-viewing
program called CryptaPix, which also crashed.

I'm *hoping* the files are still there, but for some reason they're not on
whatever NTFS calls their file allocation table -- master file table?
Perhaps if I could get Windows to rebuild the mft for that drive, the missing
files would magically reappear.

Is there any way to rebuild the master file table on an NTFS drive, such
that it will look through the drive, find every file, and recreate the table?
I'm running Win XP sp 2 most recently updated via Windows Update about two
weeks ago.

Thanks,

 

[Guest]

Restoration download and review - file undelete utility from SnapFiles:
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html

 

[Guest]

Thanks, Mark; but when I tried that program, it didn't see any of the missing
files. I think it just looks for "deleted" files... and these files don't
show up as deleted in Norton, Restoration, or any other unerase program I
tried.

I still think they're in there somewhere; how could 194 files in a directory
literally vanish overnight, leaving the directory structure untouched and not
damaging a single other file that I can see?

Is there some way to force Windows to reconstruct the MFT on that NTFS
drive? At least that would be something different enough from unerase that
it might work.

Thanks,